Blog

Over the past year and, especially over the past few months BoldBrush has gotten quite skilled at listening to our customers.

We've added live webinars, we've created an engaged Facebook group, we've refined our process of escalating customer issues from support to development and back rapidly.

We send Product Market Fit surveys daily. The results of those surveys come directly into my inbox and I respond to nearly every single one. That is a great source of direct feedback from customers.

When people cancel our service, they get a personal email from me, and many of those people respond, opening many ongoing conversations that allow me to learn how we can improve and, in a few cases, convince the person to return to the fold.

The above channels, combined with our traditional feedback channels through support, give our company a ton of ways to get feedback from customers. And we've become skilled at listening and acting upon that feedback.

I'm proud of how far our team has come in this area.

I know all this feedback can be a drag sometimes. Customers complain about everything. For months half our customers will ask for us to add a feature, and then, when we finally deliver it, the other half our our customers want us to get rid of it. And a large portion of the group that wanted the feature in the first place will complain that they don't like it or that it doesn't do enough!

When we allow ourselves the luxury of self-pity, it's easy to get a little down from the firehose of negative feedback. I'm certainly guilty of that from time to time.

But we need to remain positive and grateful for that feedback.

The most customer-centric company I know of is Amazon. And in a recent letter to congress , Jeff Bezos wrote the following, which shifted my perception of customer feedback. Or, more accurately, reminded me again that customer feedback is a gift.

He wrote, "Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great."

Isn't that a great way to look at it?

Even when customers are happy, they're dissatisfied. Which means we can at all times learn from our customers and continue to make our products even more suited for them (or, better yet, invent new products, features or services).

Bezos continued, "Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and a constant desire to delight customers drives us to constantly invent on their behalf. As a result, by focusing obsessively on customers, we are internally driven to improve our services, add benefits and features, invent new products, lower prices, and speed up shipping times—before we have to."

A focus similar to Amazon's is what we've been increasingly putting it place at BoldBrush and these initiatives relate directly into our core ideology: Obsession with Customer Success (we're demonstrating that obsession by continually listening to multiple channels of feedback), Deliver Innovation and Inspiration (by funneling that feedback into improved products and information). All of this Builds Trust (which is our number one value) and helps us to Learn and Improve Daily (which is how we grow and become better individually and as a team).

So my main message today is this: Be grateful for customer complaints (and other feedback).